BABAR AHMAD’S extradition hearing to the US on terrorism charges was to start this Thursday, 18 November, at Bow Street magistrates court in London. Mrs Ahmad, Babar’s wife, spoke to Socialist Worker before the hearing:

WE HAD to put up with a double-barrelled dose of nausea this week with Michael Howard appearing to talk welfare state politics and Tony Blair invading Hackney to claim New Labour was bringing in childcare Utopia.

IF YOU’VE had difficulty making sense of the government’s education policy then Charles Clarke, the cabinet minister responsible, has cleared up any misunderstanding. The whole thing must be geared to the needs of globalised big business, he said in a speech this Monday.

THE STRIKE by hundreds of thousands of civil service workers in the PCS union on 5 November against job cuts and attacks on pensions and sick pay was incredibly successful. Far more people struck than the government anticipated.

MEMBERS OF all the unions at Glenbrook Primary School in Lambeth, south London, have voted unanimously for a ballot for strike action against plans to turn it into a city academy for five to 19 year olds.

THIRTY HEAVILY armed Israeli police last week invaded the Anglican cathedral compound in Jerusalem where Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower, was granted sanctuary in April of this year. He was dragged before an Israeli magistrate and faced a day of interrogation.

On Tuesday 2 November Theo van Gogh, a provocative right wing columnist and film-maker, was murdered in Amsterdam. His killer was a 26 year old man from a Moroccan background. The murder has led to a vicious racist backlash.

The biggest workers’ rally in South Korea since 1997 took place on Sunday. Slogans included "An end to discrimination against temporary workers", "No to the Korea-Japan free trade area" and "For the withdrawal of Korean troops from Iraq". The rally was a launchpad for an indefinite strike by public sector workers to defend union rights in the face of repression by the government.

Comment

IN MONDAY’S Guardian Gary Younge attacked the ineptitude of the "liberal left" in Europe when confronted with religious faith, whether among evangelical Christians in the United States or Muslims in Europe:

nowadays most people recognise that Stalin’s rule in Russia was a perversion of the very name of socialism. But for many years those on the left who spoke out against Stalin were few in number and often persecuted.

Concern about humanity’s destruction of the environment is commonly seen as a recent worry. But for the 19th century socialist thinkers Karl Marx and Frederick Engels the environment was a major part of their theory.

JOHN NEWSINGER, author of Orwell’s Politics and British Counterinsurgency, will be in Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, to talk about his latest book, Rebel City: Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement (Merlin, £14.95).